The Malaysian Palm Oil Promotion Council (MPOPC) in a bid to revive palm oil exports to India will lobby with the Indian government to treat all imported oils on par and will ask for consistency in the edible oil import policy, Datuk Haron Siraj, chief executive officer, MPOPC, said.
On the sidelines of Globoil India 2002 conference, Siraj said that MPOPC is also looking at a price level of ringitts 1400 a tonne of palm oil in the next year.
The threat from soybean oil as a strong competitor and the declining share of RBD Palmolien which has been almost brought down to nil in India has alerted the MPOPC to take a relook at their marketing strategies and lobbying with the respective governments.
"Despite a tough situation where soy oil is clearly managing a premium of about $70 a tonne solely owing to import duty or tariff differential on the two oils, we will never dump oil in India," Siraj said vehemently.
"Even in a scenario when the prices would go below 1000 ringitts, we would sell lowest at about 700 ringitts, which is our cost of production. We will never undercut the prices below that to sell palm oil because we believe in fair competition," Siraj said.
It is worth mentioning that Indonesia has emerged a major supplier of crude palm oil in last few months as India has switched over to importing crude palm oil from refined palm oil. Moreover, till now Malaysia has been promoting exports of refined oil and not crude oil. In fact in wake of India's switching over to crude palm oil and Indonesia supplying the crude palm at zero percent duty, Malaysia was forced to reduce its duties on export of crude oil and exempting 1.30 million tonnes of exports at zero duty. However Siraj said that, "We would be more comfortable with having a duty of about 4 per cent."
India continues to be our largest market as far as palm oil is concerned, MPOPC is also exploring new markets such as the CIS countries and African countries. Egypt and South Africa are also emerging as potential major buyers of our oil, he added. "China will continue to need palm oil for frying noodles on an industrial basis, so it will also continue to be a focus area for MPOPC," Siraj said.
We also believe that India should lay a greater emphasis on increasing oilseed production to move towards self sufficiency, he said.
